Rare, Severe, and Hard to Simulate: Advancing Extreme Wildfire Representation in Landscape Modeling

Join ESIIL's Modeling Extreme Wildfire working group for their EDS Seminar on May 26 at 11 am MT! This talk is part of ESIIL's Working Group Showcase taking place on Tuesdays from 11-11:50 am from May 19 to June 30, 2026 where ESIIL's first cohort of working groups will share the story and legacy of their working groups.

Project Abstract

Extreme wildfire events are increasing, driven by the expansion of human populations into the wildland urban interface, land management practices which suppressed wildfire, and changes in the climate. These low probability and high consequence fire events are neither linear nor evenly distributed across all landscapes but exhibit exceptional fire behavior characteristics and produce severe consequences for natural ecosystems and humans. Although the wildfire extension of LANDIS-II simulates many of the biophysical and social dimensions of fire, including projecting future changes in fire ignitions, fire intensity, fuel-treatment effects, fire suppression, and prescribed fires, it lacks the capacity to represent extreme wildfire events, especially with climate change. In partnership with ESIIL, we conducted two workshops focused on defining extreme wildfire events and how to better capture these events in landscape models. In our first workshop, we formed a cohesive, interdisciplinary research team of biophysical and social scientists who worked at the nexus of wildfire science. In this workshop, we synthesized our current understanding of extreme fire behavior and their socioeconomic context, isolated the current gaps in our understanding of the social and biophysical markers that contribute to extreme fire behavior and risk to communities, and developed a roadmap for improving the representation of social and biophysical mechanisms that drive extreme wildfire behavior. In our second workshop, we identified gaps in how we model extreme wildfire events in large landscapes and identified solutions for addressing those gaps in LANDIS-II. We also discussed the protocol for integrating LANDIS-II into HPC environments and developed a Shiny app that highlights extreme wildfire events simulated in LANDIS-II. We hope our work will lead to improved representation of extreme wildfire events in forecasting tools by using the LANDIS-II model framework as a demonstration platform.

Speaker Bios

Dr. Melissa Lucash is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon, where her work sits at the intersection of forest ecology, wildfire science, climate change, and spatial modeling. She serves as both a lead developer of LANDIS-II, the most widely used forest landscape model in the U.S.. and as president of the LANDIS-II Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, an M.S. from Oregon State University, and a B.S. from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Dr. James Lamping is a Scientist in the Parks Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation, based at the University of Oregon. He is a forest ecologist and modeler who integrates field ecology, remote sensing, and landscape simulation modeling to understand forest structure, carbon dynamics, and climate vulnerabilities in Pacific Northwest and coastal Alaskan forests. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon and earned both his M.S. and B.S. from Cal Poly Humboldt.